Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
Questioning Authority: Commercialisation and the Academic Ideal in 18th-Century
European Art
Convenors:
Camilla Smith, University of Birmingham parker_bowles@gmx.net
Shearer West, University of Birmingham S.C.West@bham.ac.uk
This session focuses on the ‘contestation’ of high art in the face of the monolithic hierarchies established by academic art institutions in 18th-century Europe. Central to the ideas of this session is the notion of academic expectation and how artists working outside of this context engage with or seek to challenge this. A wide variety of papers on topics such as dramatic rhetoric, gender, identity, ‘unorthodox’ subject matter, colonial aesthetics and commerce, will examine artistic ventures and private commissions which put artistic establishments under continual strain to modify their conditions to accommodate a wider range of themes and objects as the public’s attitudes and tastes changed. This session seeks to address what impact a growing culture of consumption, international political instability and cosmopolitanism had on the art academy and the ways in which the academy tried to incorporate some of these ideas into its theory, training and exhibition spaces.
Speakers:
Kuei-ying Huang (University of Essex)
The Importance of Being ‘General’: Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Commercial Endorsement of Painting as a Liberal Art
Alan Boulton (University of Birmingham)
Fuseli and the Rhetoric of the Sublime
Sophie Bostock (University of East Anglia)
Canaletto: The Right Sort of Artist?
Eliana Martinis and Sarah Symmons (University of Essex)
The Late Portraits of Nicolas Koutouzis (1790–1812): a Hymn for or a Libel Against the Zakynthian Bourgeoisie?
Phillippa Plock (University of Warwick)
Art Becomes Artisan: The Case of Selling Antoine Dieu
Catherine Horwood (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Blooming Artists: Female Botanical Illustrators and the Battle for Recognition
Valerie Mainz (University of Leeds)
The Chevalier d’Eon and His Several Identities
Prasannajit de Silva (University of Sussex)
Home from home? Early Depictions of British Hill stations in India
Sue Rasmussen (University of Birmingham)
George Morland: An Academic Artist?
Caroline Palmer (Oxford Brookes University)
‘Behold me now a female Connoisseur’: women writers on art, 1770 to 1830’